Barry Hannah - Airships

And what we knew stood up. Li Dap had tried to circle left with twenty thousand and got the hell kicked out of him by idle Navy guns sitting outside Gon. He just wasn’t very bright. He had half his army climbing around these bluffs, no artillery or air force with them, and it was New Year’s Eve for our side.

“So we’re here just to kill the edge of their army?” said Tubby.

“That’s what I’m here for, why I’m elected. We kill more C’s than anybody else in the Army.”

“But what if they take a big run at you, all of them?” said Tubby.

“There’ll be lots of cooking.”

We went out in the edge of the woods and I glassed the field. It was almost night. I saw two tanks come out of the other side and our pickets running back. Pock, pock, pock from the tanks. Then you saw this white glare on one tank where somebody on our team had laid on with one of the phosphorus shotguns. It got white and throbbing, like a little star, and the gun wilted off of it. The other tank ran off a gully into a hell of a cow pond. You wouldn’t have known it was that deep. It went underwater over the gun, and they let off the cannon when they went under, raising the water in a spray. It was the silliest-looking thing. Some of them got out and a sergeant yelled for me to come up. It was about a quarter mile out there. Tubby got his camera, and we went out with about fifteen troops.

At the edge of the pond, looking into flashlights, two tankmen sat, one tiny, the other about my size. They were wet, and the big guy was mad. Lot of the troops were chortling, etc. It was awfully damned funny, if you didn’t happen to be one of the C-men in the tank.

“Of all the fuck-ups. This is truly saddening.” The big guy was saying something like that. I took a flashlight and looked him over. Then I didn’t believe it. I told Tubby to get a shot of the big cursing one. Then they brought them on back. I told the boys to tie up the big one and carry him in.

I sat on the ground, talking to Tubby.

“It’s so quiet. You’d think they’d be shelling us,” he said.

“We’re spread out too good. They don’t have much ammo now. They really galloped down here. That’s the way Li Dap does it. Their side’s got big trouble now. And, Tubby, me and you are famous.”

“Me, what?”

“You took his picture. You can get some more, more arty angles on him tomorrow.”

“Him?”

“It’s Li Dap himself. He was in the tank in the pond.”

“No. Their general?”

“You want me to go prove it?”

We walked over. They had him tied around a tree. His hands were above his head and he was sitting down. I smelled some hash in the air. The guy who was blowing it was a boy from Detroit I really liked, and I hated to come down on him, but I really beat him up. He never got a lick in. I kicked his rump when he was crawling away and some friends picked him up. You can’t have lighting up that shit at night on the ground. Li Dap was watching the fight, still cursing.

“Asshole of the mountains.” He was saying something like that. “Fortune’s ninny.”

“Hi, General. My French isn’t too good. You speak English. Honor us.”

He wouldn’t say anything.

“You have a lot of courage, running out front with the tanks.” There were some snickers in the bush, but I cut them out quick. We had a real romantic here and I didn’t want him laughed at. He wasn’t hearing much, though. About that time two of their rockets flashed into the woods. They went off in the treetops and scattered.

“It was worthy of Patton,” I said. “You had some bad luck. But we’re glad you made it alive.”

“Kiss my ass.”

“You want your hands free? Oliver, get his ropes off the tree.” The guy I beat up cut him off the tree.

“You scared us very deeply. How many tanks do you have over there?”

“Nonsense,” he said.

“What do you have except for a few rockets?”

“I had no credence in the phosphorus gun.”

“Your men saw us use them when we landed.”

“I had no credence.”

“So you just came out to see.”

“I say to them never to fear the machine when the cause is just. To throw oneself past the technology tricks of the monsters and into his soft soul.”

“And there you will win, huh?”

“Of course. It is our country.” He smiled at me. “It’s relative to your war in the nineteenth century. The South had slavery. The North must purge it so that it is a healthy region of our country.”

“You were out in the tank as an example to your men?”

“Yes!”

All this hero needed was a plumed hat.

“Sleep well,” I said, and told Oliver to get him a blanket and feed him, and feed the tiny gunner with him.

When we got back to my dump, I walked away for a while, not wanting to talk with Tubby. I started crying. It started with these hard sobs coming up like rocks in my throat. I started looking out at forever, across the field. They shot up three more rockets from the woods below the hill. I waited for the things to land on us. They fell on the tops of trees, nothing near me, but there was some howling off to the right. Somebody had got some shrapnel.

I’d killed so many gooks. I’d killed them with machine guns, mortars, howitzers, knives, wire, me and my boys. My boys loved me. They were lying all around me, laying this great cloud of trust on me. The picture of John Whitelaw about to hit that ball at Augusta was jammed in my head. There was such care in his eyes, and it was only a golf ball, a goddamned piece of nothing. But it was wonderful and peaceful. Nobody was being killed. Whitelaw had the right. He had the beloved American right to the pursuit of happiness. The tears were out of my jaws then. Here we shot each other up. All we had going was the pursuit of horror. It seemed to me my life had gone straight from teen-age giggling to horror. I had never had time to be but two things, a giggler and a killer.

Christ, I was crying for myself. I had nothing for the other side, understand that. North Vietnam was a land full of lousy little Commie robots, as far as I knew. A place of the worst propaganda and hypocrisy. You should have read some of their agitprop around Gon, talking about freedom and throwing off the yoke, etc. The gooks went for Communism because they were so ignorant and had nothing to lose. The South Vietnamese, too. I couldn’t believe we had them as allies. They were such a pretty and uniformly indecent people. I once saw a little taxi boy, a kid is all, walk into a Medevac with one arm and a hand blown off by a mine he’d picked up. These housewives were walking behind him in the street, right in the middle of Gon. Know what they were doing? They were laughing. They thought it was the most hysterical misadventure they’d ever seen. These people were on our side. These were our friends and lovers. That happened early when I got there. I was a virgin when I got to Nam and stayed a virgin, through a horde of B-girls, the most base and luscious-lipped hustlers. Because I did not want to mingle with this race.

In an ARVN hospital tent you see the hurt officers lined up in front of a private who’s holding in his guts with his hands. They’ll treat the officer with a bad pimple before they treat the dying private. We’re supposed to be shaking hands with these people. Why can’t we be fighting for some place like England? When you train yourself to blow gooks away, like I did, something happens, some kind of popping returning dream of murder-with-a-smile.

I needed away. I was sick. In another three months I’d be zapping orphanages.

“Bobby, are you all right?” said Tubby, waddling out to the tree I was hanging on.

“I shouldn’t ever’ve seen that picture of John Whitelaw. I shouldn’t’ve.”